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Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

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101–110 of 129 posts

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#101
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to get a bundle deal from Microcenter here in SoCal with the Ryzen 9950x, motherboard and 32GB of RAM for $699. They have since removed the RAM from all the bundles.

While thats a sweet upgrade for people with an older desktop that can support a motherboard swap, its worthwhile to point out the ram is probably insufficient. RAM usage for a lot of workloads scales with core/thread count, and my general rule of thumb is that 1G/thread is not enough, and 2G/thread will mostly work, and 4G/thread is probably too much, but your disk cache will be happy. Also, the same applies to VMs,…

Ha, I was going to purchase a 96GB kit, but that's when I first noticed that RAM prices were getting crazy.

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#102
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where does it say it was funded by $150B of public loans? let me repeat something you've already quoted >> the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing . one more time "to be payed by inflationary pricing" > Datacenters are actually associated with lower electricity costs in the US. "Associated" means these areas are getting preferential pricing to shift more of the cost to the p…

>let me repeat something you've already quoted >>> the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing. That framing makes even less sense. Even if we grant that capital spending is inflationary, nobody thinks the public is "on the hook" or pays for it "by inflationary pricing". If I bought a box of eggs, it probably drives up the price of eggs by some minute amount in the aggregate, but…

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Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not finding any way of figuring out if that's true or not, I live near the second-largest city in Spain, kind of feel like people probably buy as much RAM here as elsewhere in the country/continent, but maybe that's incorrect. I've tried searching for graphs/statistics for the last 1-2 years about it in Spain but not having much success.

I can add Spain price trends to PCPartPicker. Quick question though - do you want the price trends to cover just Spanish retailers, or should it trend the prices across all of the EU?

That would be incredible! Personally I only buy the stuff I can find inside the country, inside the country. But then some stuff I have to order from Germany/France/Italy when it's only available outside our borders.

So I don't know the right approach here, I can see value for both price trends for multiple reasons, unfortunately :) Wish I could give a simpler answer!

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#104

Hopefully this will put pressure on the market to produce much more efficient AI models. As opposed to bigger, then bigger, and then even BIGGER models (which is the current trend). FYI: gpt-oss:120b is better at coding (in benchmarks and my own anecdotal testing) than gpt5-mini. More importantly, it's so much faster too. We need more of this kind of optimization. Note that gpt5-mini is estimated to be around ~150 bi…

Energy and GPU costs haven't pushed the needle any, so I don't see any reason to expect that RAM costs will.

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#105
post #25

I hope this AI craze will crash soon enough. Maybe then various things normalize in price again. And consumers get cheaper products with less limitations.

Is that really the cause of this price increase? I still don't understand if this price surge is specifically for the US ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812691 ) or if it's worldwide, I'm not sure I notice anything here in Southern Europe, so either that means it's lagging and I should load up RAM today, or this is indeed US-specific. But I don't know what's true.

> that means it's lagging and I should load up RAM today, or this is indeed US-specific. But I don't know what's true.

This is a global issue that is most severe in the US due to its share of hyperscalers and their, uh, scale. You may not feel the effects yet, but it is matter of time until someone notices your market has a RAM glut, while 30-55% of their orders aren't being fulfilled.

In all likelihood, the supply channels to your locality have a low turnover rate, and DRAM has a long shelf-life. If the high prices stay high for long, it's going to impact prices when your retailers try to restock. If the price shock ends soon, your retailer may not even notice it. Whether you ought to buy or not depends on your outlook on how things will shake out

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not finding any way of figuring out if that's true or not, I live near the second-largest city in Spain, kind of feel like people probably buy as much RAM here as elsewhere in the country/continent, but maybe that's incorrect. I've tried searching for graphs/statistics for the last 1-2 years about it in Spain but not having much success.

I can add Spain price trends to PCPartPicker. Quick question though - do you want the price trends to cover just Spanish retailers, or should it trend the prices across all of the EU?

Not parent, but logically the EU is a single market, so EU-wide prices are better, IMO.

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#107
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does edge AI require less RAM?

Less ram? Not really. Less hardware? Yes. That machine is already in the wild, so why not let it have proper AI accelerator + increase memory the machine has - also the data transfer problem is solved since it's on that machine.

In that case, this wouldn't be a signal that "we've" given up on edge AI.

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a damn shame, but before AI, it was cryptomining. Desktop GPU prices have been inflated to nonsense levels for gamers, to the point where console vs. PC isnt even really question anymore.

In some ways though, the increase in visual fidelity has been _marginally_ improved on a per-year basis since the PS4/Xbone era. My GPUs have had much, much longer useful lives than the 90s/early-2000s.

Exactly plus upscalers are pretty amazing. Upscaling from 1080p to 4k is 80-100% of the quality of native rendering at a far lower cost.

Now if only major studios would budget for optimizations..

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#109
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement. (You can have inflation while your currency go up relatively to all the others on the FX market, like what happened to USD in 2022-S1, or you can have massive inflation difference between countries sharing the same currency, like it happened in the Euro Area between 2022 and today).

>Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement. Not to mention that "debasement" doesn't make sense anymore given that there basically aren't any currencies on the gold standard anymore. At best you could call a pegged currency that was devalued as being debased (with the base being the pegged currency), but that doesn't apply to USD. "debasement" therefore is just a pejorative…

It might be subjective, but doesn't this count at least partially as a currency on the gold standard?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_ZiG

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#110
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>let me repeat something you've already quoted >>> the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing. That framing makes even less sense. Even if we grant that capital spending is inflationary, nobody thinks the public is "on the hook" or pays for it "by inflationary pricing". If I bought a box of eggs, it probably drives up the price of eggs by some minute amount in the aggregate, but…

[flagged]

>"Eggs"? "Eggs" are the same as "apartment or GPU"? You display all of the comprehension abilities of an LLM... or the mainstream economist "teaching" it.

How did you miss the part about "anything else supply constrained", which was between "eggs" and "apartments"? Or are too lazy to search up "egg shortage"? Maybe you should check your own reading comprehension before accusing others of poor reading comprehension.

>Semiconductor capex are huge compared to, eh, "eggs", and they must be payed off as part of pricing.

Yet the aggregate demand of all americans drive the price of eggs, apartments, or GPUs. Either something drives inflation, or it doesn't. Otherwise you're just critiquing Micron's size rather than what their behavior is.

>Artificial jump in demand, as from hoarding, makes the capex artificially high and the pricing inflationary.

>Also, hoarding semiconductors (private NPUs like TPUs, Trainiums, etc, stocking on hard to obtain GPUs) reduces competition and via renting, the respective services can extract the inflated capex plus high profits.

1. There's no alternate universe where absent "hoarding", everyone would be running LLMs on their own GPUs at home. The frontier models require multiple 128+GB GPUs to run, and most people only do a few minutes of inference a day. There's no way the economics of buying works out.

2. "AI GPUs sitting idle because it doesn’t have enough power to install them" doesn't imply "hoarding", any more than buying PC parts but not building them because the last part hasn't arrived yet isn't "hoarding". It could simply be that they expected that power be available, but due to supply chain issues they aren't. Moreover hoarding GPUs would be a terrible idea, because they're a rapidly depreciating asset. No cloud provider is trying to corner the market on CPUs by buying them up and renting it back to people, for instance, and CPU is a much easier market to corner because the rate of advancement (and thus rate of depreciation) is much lower.

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